Thursday, January 17, 2013

Todays entry in our predictions from the future series comes from Dean Chambers, the conservative blogger and statistician famous for his staunchly pro-Romney predictions during the 2012 presidential election.

His expertise is in politics, so these are largely political predictions for 2023, but it’s a good read all around.

I expect that we’ll see many changes in society, technology and politics between now and the year 2023. As the Millennial generation grows older, more mature and politically more conservatives, we’ll see a peak and the beginnings of the decline of the left’s control over major institutions such as the mainstream media, the entertainment industry and academia. The rising tide of conservative ideas and culture, especially among a large class of second and third generation immigrants, will help bolster a giant comeback for the Republican in the 2020s and beyond.

The rise of conservative values will drown out the promotion of values and issues from the far left. Increasing percentages of those who call themselves “Pro-Life” in the polls will make clear that the abortion debate has been won by the Pro-Life side and Roe may or may not be repealed, but it won’t matter. Even where abortion remains legal it will be impossible to find a place to get one. The Pro Life movement will have run the abortion industry out of business more effectively than the anti-nuclear movement shut down nuclear power. And vast majorities of the public will approve of this.

Technology will continue to advance forward as it makes many products and services less expensive, most of the middle and lower classes will enjoy the advantages of technology and this will be more true going into the future than it is now. Apple’s iPhone product will prove to be superior and win in the marketplace, as just about everyone by 2023 will be use an iPhone, or if Apple allows it, a compatible other brand cell phone using Apple’s iPhone operating system. And even more so than is now true, the cell phones will be used for almost everything we know use computers to do.

Politics will get even more interesting as time goes forward, it always does anyway. The major issue of contention will be over ObamaCare and its implementation. This struggle will be at the forefront of what will essentially be a civil war. But as much as we may fight over guns in this civil war, we will not fight it with guns. This will be an entirely political and cultural civil war. Call it the “civil war” between the “blue” and “red” states and populations.

The early rumblings of the civil war can already be seen with the dozens of states that are resisting the implementation of ObamaCare exchanges and other provisions in their states. Many of those states, such as Virginia and Missouri, have already passed state laws blocking the implementation and enforcement of the individual mandate requiring citizens to purchase medical insurance. This will become a full-blown resistance movement that will sweep the country and when the Obama justice department seeks prosecution under the ObamaCare law, opposing citizens will nullify juries and make it impossible to gain convictions against individuals and small business that resist ObamaCare.

The rise of the health freedom movement and believers in natural and alternative medicine will be another challenge to ObamaCare. As more citizens come to regard much of what modern medicine as as unhealthy or unnecessary, this will challenge the enforcement of ObamaCare as well. An increasing percentage of citizens who espouse natural or alternative medicine will opt out of participating in what the medical industry offers. We already see this with the health freedom movement’s challenges to the effectiveness of immunization and the view that the medical industry over-prescribes many drugs and performs way too many unneeded surgeries.

We’ll hear more slogans like “don’t stick me with ObamaCare” and the like coming from the health freedom movement. When the medical industry’s abuse and overuse of antibiotics causes a huge public health scare when antibiotic resistance strains of bacteria lead to modern plagues, the argument will be won by those who preach alternative medicine over drugs. By 2023 a growing and vocal minority rising against the practices of medicine will grow to be a majority. By 2023 most people won’t take the shots anymore, immunizations as we know them today will be obsolete and the diseases will not come back either. The conventional medical industry as we know it will be financially bankrupted by ObamaCare while it is shown to be intellectually bankrupted by the alternative medicine and nature medicine communities winning the debates over those issues.

The civil war over enforcement of ObamaCare and other issues will lead to an increasingly polarized country where we will be people vote with their feet and move to live in more “blue” or “red” states politically as they choose. This will increase the degree to which “red” states become far more politically conservative and economically libertarian while the so-called “blue” states become increasing more liberal politically and more statist economically. ObamaCare will be fully implemented in the “blue” who will find themselves further bankrupted by it. At the national level, politics will continue to divided almost down the middle between the conservative and liberal brands of politics represented by the Republicans and Democrats respectively.

President Obama will finish his second term as president having spent the entire term fighting with Republicans in Congress and will show very little further accomplishments for his efforts. 2016 will bring up very divided primaries in both parties that will lead to the nominations of Chris Christie for the Republicans and Hillary Clinton for the Democrats. Hillary will nominate Cory Booker, who will be a senator from New Jersey by then, and Christie will choose the hero of the legal challenge to ObamaCare, former state Attorney General and by then Governor of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli.

The 2014 midterm elections will be a smaller scale Republican win than 2010, with the GOP regaining about the number of seats in the House they lost in 2012, and gaining 3-4 senate seats but falling just short of gaining a majority. This will set up a contentious and close 2016 election that will end up looking much like 2012.

The Clinton-Booker and Christie-Cuccinelli tickets will battle out in a close election that will be finished with Clinton winning by a smaller margin in popular and electoral votes than Obama won in 2012. And the reason will be the same, the Republicans will prove they failed to win one of the key lessons of the 2012 election and they will have failed to build the turnout machine to get out their votes that could have won in both 2012 and 2016. Very few house and senate seats will change parties in 2016 and it will be said once again to be a very status quote election. In reality, it will be ineffective Republicans having turn a chance to win the presidency and the senate into failures on both counts.

The ongoing political civil war, fought largely at the state level, will render the Clinton administration largely a lame duck one and politically very weak. By 2018 the GOP will be starting to get itself reformed politically and Republicans will finally take control of the senate in the midterm election under President Hillary Clinton and expand their majority in the house.

In 2020 the GOP will nominate a ticket of Cuccinelli and Senate Majority Leader Marco Rubio, and will defeat Hillary Clinton in the presidential race by a wide margin. By 2020, the vast disparity between the economic prosperity of the “red” states and the bankruptcies of the “blue” states will have most of the economic argument nationally settled. It will be clear that the free market works and big government and statist economics of the hard left do not work.

The Cuccinelli-Rubio ticket will run the first very clear choice election since 1980, one of the free market economics of the “red” states versus the failed socialism and statism of the “blue” states, and the former will even win in many of the “blue” states wanting to find a return to prosperity. While there will still be debates over social issues, the debate over economic issues will be settled. By having allowed the “blue” states to experiment with statist and socialist ideas and proven them to be a failure, we’ll have learned our lessons on economics and turned sharply in the direction of embracing the free market.